TEMECULA, Calif., Oct. 7 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- SurgiCount Medical, a division of Patient Safety Technologies (OTC Bulletin Board: PSTX - News), and the manufacturer of the Safety-Sponge(TM) system, announced their first implementation of a New York hospital to use SurgiCount Medical's Computer Assisted Sponge Counting System. Estimated value in purchases to exceed $200,000 per year.

SurgiCount's Safety-Sponge(TM) System consists of individually bar-coded surgical sponges and an easy-to-use portable scanner that validates traditional hand sponge counts and will be implemented across all services, thus offering the same standard of care to all of their patients.

"We are very pleased to have implemented the System into our first New York based hospital. The Safety-Sponge System continues to gain national acceptance. Our current customer base has enjoyed knowing that the System works and is extremely reliable. They find it to be a safe, simple and cost effective solution to retained surgical sponges. We estimate that our SurgiCount Safety-Sponge(TM) System has successfully been used in over 200,000 procedures without a single report of a retained surgical sponge," says Rick Bertran, President of SurgiCount Medical. "Based upon a comparison to published data, our sponge tracking system appears to significantly reduce the possibility of a retained sponge during a medical procedure. This success, combined with an overall increase in public awareness of patient safety concerns, leads us to believe that other large institutions will soon adopt our surgical sponge patient safety solution." With over 4,000 potential institutions and 45,000 operating rooms nationally, that are subject to this "never event" we feel there is a significant opportunity to expand our leadership in this market.

About SurgiCount Medical, Inc.

SurgiCount Medical, Inc., a division of Patient Safety Technologies, Inc. (OTC Bulletin Board: PSTX - News), manufactures the SurgiCount Safety-Sponge(TM) System, a patented FDA 510(k) approved turn key solution to retained surgical sponges. The system is comprised of surgical sponges and towels affixed with an inseparable two-dimensional data matrix bar code and a SurgiCounter scanner to record each sponge before and after an operation. Because all sponges are identified with a unique code, they can not be counted twice. At the end of a procedure, the system can either immediately produce a printed report or the information can be imported into a database program. The SurgiCount Safety-Sponge(TM) System is also the only retained sponge system to offer complete sponge inventory tracking, reporting features, and integration with a medical facility's IT system. For more information, please contact SurgiCount at (951) 587-6201, or visit http://www.surgicountmedical.com .